Drug Resistance

The biggest study so far of resistance to AIDS drugs, to be released today at an international AIDS conference in Paris, finds that about 10 percent of all newly infected patients in Europe are infected with drug-resistant strains. The researcher who led the study called the level of resistance to some anti-AIDS drugs "surprisingly high." Other scientists at the conference agreed that the findings have worldwide public health implications and make the hunt for new classes of AIDS drugs more critical.

Good article in Sunday's (Feb. 27) paper. I was trying to understand the resistance to the drug database. Privacy intrusion — I can't offer much on that except to compare cost/benefits of loss of privacy vs. saved lives. Seems like a reasonable exchange. Cost is much easier. First never give the government the job of implementation. Get an unemployed, highly experienced systems analyst the most powerful PC money will buy. Have this analyst work independently (not directly for the government — that's almost as bad as them doing it themselves)

Widespread misuse of anti-HIV drugs has led to drug resistance in at least half the population under treatment for the disease in the United States, scientists are reporting today. Most striking, researchers said, is the demographic breakdown of drug resistance. Contrary to forecasts made in 1996 when combination drug therapy was introduced, it is not the poor and IV drug users who have the highest rates of resistance because of failure to properly take the drugs. Rather, it is white, gay, fully insured, highly educated men who carry the most highly drug-resistant viruses.

Drug-resistant tuberculosis killed about 150,000 people in 2008, and half of all the world's cases are thought to be in China and India, the World Health Organization has said in a report. No one knows the exact number of cases of the two types of drug-resistant TB, called MDR and XDR for multi-drug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant. A few places, such as Peru and Hong Kong, have fought the disease effectively, as New York City did in the early 1990s. Progress has been made in parts of Siberia, but in another region of Russia, more than a quarter of all cases are drug-resistant.

Oscar Negron paused for a moment of silent prayer, holding a bright red ribbon in his hand, outside the War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale. Negron, a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, was remembering Enrique Camarena, a DEA agent who was killed in 1985 after infiltrating a band of drug traffickers in Mexico. "After this exceptional officer died, Nancy Reagan started the Just Say No campaign in schools," Negron said. "Unfortunately, in my job, we see the dark side of drug trafficking, not glamorized portrayals like on TV and in movies.

Police are accepting applications for contestants for the 1994 Cops & Kids Walk and Run for DARE, a drug-resistance education program. Police are inviting the public to walk or run a three-mile course that begins at Providencia Park in downtown West Palm Beach. Participants who pre-register will be charged $10. People who register on Feb. 19, the day of the event, will pay $12. The event is designed to raise money for the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, which teaches children about how to make informed decisions when approached with drugs.

Police are accepting applications for contestants for the 1994 Cops & Kids, Walk and Run for DARE, a drug-resistance education program. Police are inviting the public to walk or run a three-mile course that begins at Providencia Park in downtown West Palm Beach. Participants who pre-register will be charged $10. People who register on Feb. 19, the day of the event, will pay $12. The event is designed to raise money for the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, which teaches children about how to make informed decisions when approached with drugs.

Recent research advances hold the promise of overcoming one of the most serious problems in cancer treatment: the tendency for tumors in some patients to become resistant to chemotherapy. A new report pinpoints the way cancer cells become resistant to certain compounds frequently used in chemotherapy. Another preliminary study hints that a drug used to treat heart disease may prevent drug resistance in some cancer patients. Cancer cells have proven remarkably adaptable, developing various ways to thwart most drugs meant to kill them.

The World Health Organization announced Tuesday that it will create a new model to buy antiretroviral AIDS drugs in hopes of dramatically speeding distribution and reducing the cost of the life-saving medication. The plan comes from a collaboration among tuberculosis experts, foremost among them the new WHO director general, Jong-wook Lee. That program, called the TB Drug Facility, purchases drugs in bulk on behalf of countries and then oversees the distribution. Global health specialists have applauded the program because it created a larger market for TB drugs and spurred competition.

By Marc Santora and Lawrence K. Altman The New York Times, February 12, 2005

A rare strain of HIV that is highly resistant to virtually all anti-retroviral drugs and appears to lead to the rapid onset of AIDS was detected in a New York City man last week, city health officials announced on Friday. It was the first time a strain of HIV had been found that showed resistance to multiple drugs as well as led to AIDS so quickly, the officials said. While the extent of the spread of the disease is unknown, officials called a news conference to say the situation was alarming.

The world is on the cusp of an explosion of drug-resistant tuberculosis cases that could deluge hospitals and leave physicians fighting a nearly untreatable malady with little help from modern drugs, global experts said Wednesday. "The situation is already alarming and poised to grow much worse very quickly," said Dr. Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization. With Bill Gates at her side, Chan urged health officials from 27 countries at a three-day forum in Beijing on drug-resistant TB to recognize the warning signs of what looms ahead, saying that traditional drugs are useless against some strains of tuberculosis and health care costs for treating those strains can be 100 to 200 times more than for regular tuberculosis.

Federal health officials and a medical society see a downside to retailers offering free and $4-a-month medicine: It may entice people to misuse antibiotics and worsen a growing problem of drug-resistant bacteria. The experts have sent letters to four retail chains and will send more in the future - including to Publix, Walmart and Walgreens - urging them to tone down drug ads and do more to educate customers about antibiotic use. "A number of the chains were advertising free antibiotics as a solution to cold and flu season.

A case of MRSA, a bacterial skin infection, was confirmed this week at Don Estridge High Tach Middle School in Boca Raton. MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, was seen in the past mostly in health care settings, but more recently has appeared in schools, Principal Karen Whetsell wrote in an e-mail sent to parents Tuesday. "MRSA is not a disease that primarily affects children or the school setting," Whetsell wrote, "and outbreaks of MRSA in schools are rare, except among athletic teams where close person-to-person contact may occur."

In a matter of days, it jumped from a routine news release to a medical controversy. On Monday, a team of researchers led by doctors from the University of California at San Francisco announced that gay men were "many times more likely than others" to acquire a new strain of drug-resistant staphylococcus, a nasty, fast-spreading and potential lethal bacteria known as MRSA USA300. And sure enough, the study, published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was quickly picked up by reporters around the world and across the Internet, including a London tabloid that dubbed the disease "the new HIV."

Some veterinarians are documenting more and more cases of drug-resistant staph infections in dogs and cats, but say there is no reason for alarm among pet owners if they follow measures of simple hygiene. Dr. Lewis Gelfand, a Long Beach, N.Y., veterinarian, said he's treating an increasing number of animals with skin eruptions infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus - MRSA. The cases seem to have increased, he said, in recent months. "It's definitely a rapidly expanding problem," Gelfand said, adding that he has had 19 cases in dogs in the past year.

An experimental AIDS drug taken in combination with a recently approved medication dramatically reduced the amount of virus in the blood of patients with a history of drug resistance, according to two international studies published today. The studies reported that up to 18 percent more drug-resistant patients saw the amount of virus in their blood drop to undetectable levels after 24 weeks compared to those taking a standard drug regimen. The results with the experimental drug etravirine give a much-needed boost in the fight against drug resistance among HIV patients, particularly those resistant to the workhorse class of drugs known as non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, or NNRTIs.

Within a year, if all goes well, the first cancer patient will be injected with two new drugs that can eradicate any type of cancer, with no obvious side effects and no drug resistance _ in mice. Some cancer researchers say the drugs are the most exciting treatment they have seen. But then they temper their enthusiasm with caution, noting that the history of cancer treatments is full of high expectations followed by dashed hopes when drugs with remarkable effects in animals are tested in people.

Evidence has been accumulating since the 1970s that the overuse of antibiotics for animals and humans is creating bacteria that are resistant to the drugs, making it more and more difficult to treat infections. A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists says that the situation is even worse with animals than experts believed, and that the use of antibiotics may be 40 percent higher than drug industry figures. Each time the subject of antibiotic resistance makes the headlines, consumer demand increases for meat and poultry produced without the drugs.

Gonorrhea has grown resistant to the main drugs used to kill it, especially in South Florida where the number of resistant infections tripled last year, health officials said Thursday. The nation's second most common sexually transmitted disease now can be reliably treated with only one antibiotic, which may cause problems for allergic patients and poses a risk the bacteria could become immune to all drugs, said officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We have reached a level of resistance that threatens our ability to treat the infection," said Dr. John Douglas, STD prevention director at the CDC. "No new drugs for gonorrhea [are]